Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Today I got this email, ostensibly from Keith Yamamoto, who I have interacted with a bit over the years, including in the writing of the NAS "New Biology" report.

So I decided to check out the meeting site. Precision Medicine World Conference. Hosted by Stanford and UCSF and Duke and Others. And also a "manel". Also known as a YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting). A festival in fact of men. So so so many men listed as speakers. Here is my round up.

Just so sick of meetings like this. Apparently Keith Yamamoto and UCSF and Duke and Stanford and all the Sponsors endorse having a meeting where about 1 in 6 of the speakers are women. No thanks. Not interested. I am sure they can all make a litany of excuses. But I am so tired of hearing them. In the end the only way to get some of these groups to change their practices is to boycott their meetings. And to publicly discuss, with the sponsors and speakers and organizers, why their meeting is not OK.

Someone sent me an announcement for SynBioBeta SF 2016 - SynBioBeta possibly thinking I would go to it. Since it was local I decided to check it out. And, well, the 1st thing I did was to look at the gender balance of the speakers (as much as I could infer from a quick skim). And it did not look good. So I dug into it in more detail.

They have a speaker page and I went through most of them to make sure my inference of gender was correct (based on looking at the pronouns used to describe them in their speaker bio and also in other web sites). I know this is imperfect but seems potentially a decent estimator. And low an behold when you sum it all up you get 79% male speakers vs. 21% female speakers. They could definitely do better.